The start of it all

Thirty years ago I wandered into an area both familiar for its proximity, and unknown as any place is when you usually just pass through.

In the eighties, I travelled Montreal-Toronto a fair bit. On the north side of the 401, just west of the Cornwall Power Dam Road exit, is a forested area on something of a rise. I was impressed at the densely treed muscularity of this landscape feature in what is generally a flat farming area. I was enticed to investigate, but never got round to it. In the nineties, a combination of events led me to do so.

I was hitting 40, just finishing my doctorate, the country squeaked through another Québec referendum, and my yearning to live quietly in the country tugged hard during this turning point. In response to mid-life, I could either buy a red sports car or go to a place where they were nice to old people. I chose the latter, finding a pleasing spot away from ethnic politics that would never be a tourist hotbed, with all the development that this entails. This, in short, is Glengarry, and it continues to marvel me three decades on.

In 1993, I bought a small, broken down house on a cleared acre across from a beautiful glen with a barn, placed ever so pastorally perfect, on the opposite side. People still ask me if the house is “on the water,” something most associate with “country home”. My experiences visiting Vermont as a kid, and visits to areas surrounding the GTA, told be this was not necessarily top of the list. I tell these folks, there are many stunning homes in Glengarry, facing a large rolling meadow. I consider these to be frozen ocean swells, standing waves, that have the advantage to not host noisy watercraft.

The knolls, fields and forests of Glengarry, and the way many have considered the undulations and breaks in the land in situating their homes, are pretty much the quintessence of the pastoral idyll. Throw in some meandering rivers, some wild wetlands and what is just about the finest historical hamlet anywhere, and you have more than enough beauty to happily pass on the house-by-the-lake ideal.

The house on the First of Kenyon was a laboratory, a place to learn how things work. With Dennis’s master craftsman input, the rundown little cottage was nursed into a cozy home, but one, ultimately, built for a small family. In retirement, that house has been turned over to a new project, a home for aging in place. New surprises unfold, but the gentleness is constant.

19867 Kenyon Concession Rd 1 | Listing Video from InsideOut Media on Vimeo.